Dark Water by Koji Suzuki.
Title: Dark Water.
Author: Koji Suzuki.
Genre: Fiction, literature, short stories, horror, mystery.
Country: Japan.
Language: Japanese.
Publication Date: 1996 (translated in 2004).
Summary: A collection of 7 horror stories that revolve around water. The Prologue and Epilogue frame the stories by revealing that they are told by a grandmother to her granddaughter, from many things the grandmother observes washing up on the shore, and an incredible finding that she once makes, that changes everything. In Floating Water, a young mother and her daughter who take refuge from a messy divorce in a run-down, almost uninhabited apartment building, begin to sense a foreign presence that may have to do with a missing child case from a few years earlier. In Solitary Isle, an abusive boyfriend dumps his girlfriend on an abandoned isle and only tells one friend before dying, and the story comes back to haunt the friend years later when he makes a visit to the island himself. In The Hold, a callous fisherman who cannot figure out the whereabouts of his wife goes out to sea, only to come face-to-face the horrors of his own nature . In Dream Cruise, a conniving couple takes their unassuming friend out on a yacht to rope him into a pyramid scheme, but the murky waters and the presences within will not let them succeed. In Adrift, when a deep-sea fishing boat comes across an abandoned luxury family yacht in the ocean, a man is tasked with manning it whilst it is towed to Japan, but when alone on the yacht he discovers a sinister and violent presence that may be tied into a mysterious shell the family discovered before meeting a dark fate. Watercolors is a story about an acting troupe that takes on an unlikely challenge of utilizing several floors and an enormous amount of water for their unusual performance. In Forest Under the Sea, a man is trapped in a subterranean cave after an accident, and attempts to use both his cave-diving and spelunking expertise, as well as the ardent wish to see his toddler son again, to get out of the increasingly hopeless situation.
My rating: 8/10.
My review:
♥ Driftage can spark the beach-comer's imagination. The sight of a motorcycle's side cover can conjure up the image of a biker skidding off a pier into the sea, while a plastic bag stuffed with used syringes has a whiff of a crime. Each item of debris has its own tale to tell. Any particularly intriguing thing you may come across on the beach is best left untouched-because it begins to tell its tale to you, as soon as you pick it up. Fine if the story is heartwarming, but if it curdles your blood, things will never be the same.
Especially if you love the sea, you ought to be mindful. You pick up what looks like a rubber glove and find out it's really a severed hand. That sort of thing could keep you off the beaches forever. The feeling of picking up a hand is probably not too easy to shake off.
~~from Prologue.
♥ Thinking again about drinking the tap water, Yoshimi Massubara held the glass up to the fluorescent light in the kitchen. Rotating it just above eye level, she saw tiny bubbles floating in it. Tangled up with them, or so it seemed, were countless particles of dirt that could have come in the water or been a deposit at the bottom of the glass. She thought better of taking a second gulp and with a grimace, poured the water down the sink.
It just didn't taste the same. It was already three months since they'd moved from their rented house in Musashino to this seven-story apartment building that stood on a landfill, but she still couldn't get used to the tap water. She'd take a gulp out of habit, but the strange odor, which wasn't even like chloramine, attacked her nostrils and almost always kept her from finishing the glass.
...Barely registering her daughter's pleas, still clutching the empty glass, Yoshimi was picturing the path their water had to take from the Tone River. As she tried to trace the route in her mind, wondering how it differed from the flow of water back in Musashino, an image of tar-black sludge came to her. She did not know exactly when the apartment's site had been filled, nor in what way the water pipes wound from island to island. But she did know, from a map charting the history of Tokyo Bay, that the land they lived on didn't exist in the late '20s. The thought that the uncertain ground beneath her feet had as its foundation the dregs of several generations enfeebled her grip on the glass.
♥ She had never once found anything enjoyable about the physical union of man and woman. Her only world for it was "agonizing." Yet there is never any shortage of talk about sex in the world. She simply couldn't understand it. Perhaps some insurmountable barrier separated her from other people. They differed on everything from what constituted beauty and ugliness to definitions of pain and pleasure. The world as she perceived it was largely at odds with the world as others saw it.
♥ A plastic washbasin floated on the waster in the cream-colored bathtub. In the center of this basin was a small drenched towel that rose up in the form of a column. It somehow resembled a wayside jizo statue, but one with its head tilted to one side. Having soaked the towel and wrung it into this shape, Ikuko now seemed to be talking to the towel as if it were a playmate. A trickle of water dripped from the tap into the bath, linking the opening of the tap and the surface of the bathwater with a slender column. As the little washbasin floating in the bath came into contact with this column of water, it tilted a little and started spinning.
♥ Yoshimi's mind began to race in confusion. Something didn't fit. She was missing some essential point.
It couldn't have been Ikuko!
Her right foot almost missed a step as this realization came to her. It could not have been Ikuko who'd come up to the seventh floor in the elevator; her daughter was too short to be able to reach the button for the seventh floor. A shiver ran down Yoshimi's spine. As she looked up she saw the shadow gaining greater substance. There could be no doubt that someone or something was up there. She heard the joints in her legs crack from the strain.
...If it wasn't her daughter, who was it?
♥ She made an effort to think about something else. The novel by that writer of violent fiction, the novel she was proofreading at work, would do as well as anything else to occupy her thoughts. What she needed to do was to recall some of those appalling scenes and thereby sever the chain of associations. Yet this just wasn't possible; the swelling images always converged on one point. The red bag with the Kitty motif that was found on the rooftop, the missing child Mitsuko, the fleeting shadow under the tank, the mysterious stop made by the elevator at the second floor. The evening before, a thin stream of water had linked the bathroom in their apartment with the overhead water tank on the roof. Immersed in the bathwater, Ikuko had been talking openly to Mitsuko as if she were actually there. All this led to a sole conclusion. Yoshimi forced herself to block out this train of thought with a scene from the novel she'd been proofing. In that fictitious world thick with the stench of gore, a punk had been abducted and confined by a rival gang, who were subjecting him to a series of brutal beatings, when purely by coincidence... Yes, that was it: she should think of it as a coincidence. The overhead water tank just happened to be cleaned the very day little Mitsuko disappeared. How absurd to think it could have been anything other than coincidence. Yes, now that she thought about it, every part of it could be explained rationally. In the case of the Kitty bah, neighborhood children had put it on the rooftop in some kind of ritual, out of some childlike fancy, perhaps to signal a UFO. No doubt the children had seen the bag in the garbage dump, retrieved it, then quickly returned it to the rooftop. The elevator had stopped at the second floor quite simply because someone living on that floor had pressed the button with the intent of going down. When the elevator started dithering at the fourth floor, however, he or she had clearly lost patience and decided to walk down the stairway. That was why there hadn't been anyone waiting when the door opened.
By forcibly disconnecting one event from another, Yoshimi sought to find a logical underpinning for each mangled fragment. Yet no matter how hard she tried to disrupt her train of thought, the severed fragments would instantly link up again, like some serpent growing larger every time it reconnected. She was already aware of the truth, but didn't want to accept it. The one and only possible conclusion. The inescapable conclusion.
There was no mistaking it, Mitchan was in that overhead tank on the rooftop.
She tried to suppress the thought, only to have the scene unfold in her mind. While the cleaners were away on their lunch break, the little girl had either fallen in the tank or been intentionally thrown in by someone. The decomposing corpse. The Kitty bag she clasped to tightly. The water-filled corpse. The Kitty bag she clasped so tightly. The water-filled coffin. She had been drinking that water for the past three months. She had cooked with it, made coffee and chilled summer drinks with it. How many times had they soaked in hot bathwater that teemed with countless putrid cells? How many times had they washed their hands and their faces in it? More than you could tally.
♥ It was then that she heard it. The sound of water dripping one drop at a time into the bathtub beside her. She thought she had turned off the tap tightly. Still, a tiny amount of water seemed to be leaking though. Her knees pressed against the floor, she clasped the toilet bowl with both arms. She frantically swallowed back the saliva, trying to prevent her delusions from becoming reality. Hallucinations! It was obvious. Hallucinations coursed through her very veins. She saw something that looked like the corpse of a little girl floating in the foul water that had collected in the bath. The face was purple and swollen to almost twice its original size. She tried to scream "Stop!" and fell back on the wet floor. A red plastic beaker floated near the breast of the corpse. A green plastic wind-up frog swam across the surface of the water, its front and back legs jerking busily. The frog bumped into the shoulder of the corpse, swam away, and returned to bump into the same shoulder, over and over again, each time gouging a tiny piece of flesh from the corpse with its plastic claws. The bright-red bag with the Kitty motif bobbed up and down, its strap held tight in the grasp of the corpse, the bone of whose clenched hands showed in places.
Apart from jerky gasps, Yoshimi had all but stopped breathing. The stench that assailed her nostrils was not unlike that of rotting kitchen waste. As she tried to avert her eyes from the putrefying corpse whose stench filled the bathroom, she stuck her head on the door and collapsed in a heap, her cheek striking the chilly wooden floor of the corridor.
~~Floating Water.
♥ Even with some desperate chemotherapy, Aso had only two months or so left to live.
Strangely enough, Kensuke was left unfazed by the news. He closed his eyes and calmly let the fact sink in that the time had come. The happy days that they'd shared sped all in a jumble across his mind's eye, but the idea that "it was unbelievable" simply didn't occur to him-only the terrible pity of dying at twenty-three, Kensuke's own age.
~~Solitary Isle.
♥ It had been a ludicrous sequence: baseball hits son in ribs, son exhibits a painful expression, father sets out to get even with the culprits who threw the ball, son suddenly claims there's nothing wrong, hence father gives son something real to cry about. Hiroyuko was at a loss to describe the absurdity of it in words. He slowly shook his bowed head and muttered to himself.
...I'm beginning to be like pop.
His son sobbing convulsively before him reminded him of himself at that age. He had been exactly the same. As the one wielding angry fists now, he'd become the spitting image of his father. Realizing this made him no more capable of altering what he had become. Knowing where the violence in his veins originated didn't help him resist the impulse. The mass of emotion just surged up to shake him.
♥ As he observed his daughter and his father, sitting opposite each other eating jam buns in silence, the sight depressed him anew. How irritating it was not to be able to ask either of them whether his wife had returned while he had been out. Irritation was not the word; he was beginning to feel as if two dark walls were closing in on him from above and below to crush the life out of him. One he had given life; the other had given him life. Now he was trapped between the two.
♥ Since the rubber flaps prevented the conger eels from escaping, they would squirm around in the dark slippery tube. Hiroyuki was definitely not one for metaphors, but he thought the slippery squirming interior of the tube and the struggling eel resembled nothing so much as sexual intercourse. What pitiful creatures men were to be lured by a scent into a trap from which they could not escape! It was Hiroyuki's own story, too. He'd fallen into a trap set by a woman, when he was just twenty-two, that period of life when he was most set on having a good time. Trapped, unable to escape, he had set up home and started a family. The woman had become pregnant with his son Katsumi, and the inevitable obligation, marriage, had followed. He had not married for love. The love he had thought would bloom in time never did. Nothing changed. If he were asked whether he felt any affection for his wife, or children, he would have had to shake his head. It had all transpired beyond his control. Hiroyuki had never once liked another human being.
♥ Upon waking he would first look at the sky, then later, before leaving the harbor, check the clouds over the surrounding mountains. Fishermen always turned to the mountains for clues as to how the weather would turn out that day, whether it was likely to be windy or rainy. Any fisherman who did not know how to accurately read the winds and skies in and around the fishing grounds risked losing his life at sea.
♥ No sooner had he thrust his head downward than a spectral human form drifted toward the hazy opening. Its hair fanned out around the head. As though to block the exit, the wife's corpse had wandered out from the side, and it danced like a dark shadow in the faint light from below.
The sight made Hiroyuki gulp seawater. Terrified by his wife's movements, which seemed willful, he used up all the air in his lungs.
...Exit's blocked.
There was nothing to do but surface again.
This time, he had almost to lick the bottom of the boat to get any air. He let out a silent scream. The smell of fuel, which must have leaked from the engine, assailed his nostrils.
It was all up with him, all over.
He pissed himself, and started crying. Above, the boat floor. Below, the sea. The only exit was occupied by his wife. Hiroyuki had no space left to live.
♥ As he thought of his imminent death, a notion popped into his mind. Twenty years ago, around when his mother disappeared, Hiroyuki's father had narrowly escaped death. Hiroyuki had never doubted his father's story. But now, with death staring him in the face, he understood the truth. Just as Hiroyuki had done, his father had killed his wife and used his fishing as an alibi for disposing the body out at sea. His father's mental troubles had nothing to do with having his his head. His terrible deed had slowly driven him mad.
♥ Hiroyuki could not wait for the divers to come get him.
Suddenly, his body was hugged by powerful arms. They were here!
He could hear no voices, but he felt the reassuring words in his stomach: "You're all right now."
Hiroyuki felt for the diver's arm and clung to him. The diver put his arm around Hiroyuki's shoulder and inserted a regulator snugly into his mouth. Holding the mouthpiece tightly between his teeth, he drew in air. It had the aroma of a highland plateau; never had air tasted so sweet. Determined to never let go of it, he bit deeper into the mouthpiece, sucking in the air over and over again.
He was ecstatic. Once back in the land of the living, he would be able to love them all, his son, his daughter, even his senile father. The shell that encased him was cracking and breaking off like the lie it had always been. He was sorry not everything could be the same again. He was going to beg for his wife's forgiveness. He had no idea how to apologize to the dead. His desire to do so, however, was genuine.
Hiroyuki had taken it for granted that the diver would escort him in a downward dive. But he felt himself suddenly floating up instead. In an instant, he was gazing at the keel of the Hamakatsu, which was now barely afloat. Resembling nothing more permanent than a leaf on the water, the boat looked as if it would go under at any moment. The patrol boat made its way towards them. People jostled about on the deck; they all seemed to be shouting things, but Hiroyuki couldn't hear their voices.
He could see all around him, all of the sea and the sky. Bursting through the clouds, shafts of light poured down onto the crests of waves as they broke and spewed their foam. Catching the light, the spray scintillated like jewels hurled in every direction. This was the sea he had known from childhood. Cape Futtsu stretched straight toward him. The wind and waves were strong. Never had he seen the sea so sublime, it shimmered. A sense of relief enveloped him, and his body felt lighter and lighter.
A phrase he'd never once uttered in his life came to him now: All clear!
He spoke the words and they felt good. He spoke them once more.
The patrol ship retrieved the two bodies simultaneously. It was obvious that one was that of a woman who'd been dead for two or three days. The other was that of a man who'd just breathed his last. What this meant would be understood in due course.
What they would never understand, however, was why the man had died with the woman's cadaver locked in his embrace. He certainly didn't look like he'd clutched at straw in panic-stricken desperation. Far from anguished, the man's expression was serene. Something else that troubled the rescue team was that the woman's right thumb was plunged down to its base in the man's mouth. How on earth could the dead woman insert her thumb into the man's mouth? Nonetheless, that was how it looked to those who saw the corpses.
The man must have bitten down hard on the thumb, for his jaws refused to unclamp even after the recovered bodies had been laid on the deck of the patrol boat. When they pried his mouth open and removed the thumb, they found that it'd nearly come off. They tried giving the man artificial respiration to see if he could be revived. It was useless. He showed no signs of returning to life. He was dead. They could have saved him if they'd reached him just a few minutes sooner.
The man's serene expression, however, soothed the rescuers' feelings. It wasn't easy to bite down so fiercely and at the same time wear such a serene expression. But this man had accomplished the contradiction.
~~The Hold.
♥ Now that he thought about it, Enoyoshi should have suspected Ushijima's motives and been altogether more circumspect. In the past, there'd been acquaintances who'd contacted him out of the blue, asking to meet up for old times' sake, only to approach him then with some dubious scheme. It now seemed only natural that, graduates of the same school or not, the act of inviting a stranger involved an ulterior motive. If hey were still fellow students, that would have been one thing. In the adult world, however, any relationship usually revolved around an eye to some sort of gain.
♥ But what he did next was to shudder and croak, "This boat isn't going anywhere." His tone made him sound like a stubborn old man.
"Why not?"
"I touched, with this hand." He held up a palm.
"Touched what?"
"The hands."
...Ushijima's hand had touched hands?
Enoyoshi began wishing that he'd never asked. There were millions of scary tales about dead spirits pulling at the legs of swimmers, but if Ushijima was trying to tell him some yarn about a hand emerging from the seabed to take hold of their keel, that was too far-fetched even to be a joke.
After a moment of silence, Ushijima opened his mouth again. "A child is stronger than you'd think," he said.
♥ Instantly, an image had flashed in Ushijima's mind. In the first place, he could never have seen anything in that sludge at night. Ushijima hadn't seen whatever he'd seen with his eyes. He had seen with his mind's eye an illusion formed by his famous imagination. A drowned little boy clinging to the keel, his face bloated like a balloon, eyes sunken deep into mushy flesh, the top of a pale tongue sticking out from his mouth... A drowned boy's body clinging tightly to the keep like a hugging doll and immobilizing the yacht...
♥ Glancing out, he saw the yacht rocking violently on the perfectly placid surface. Enoyoshi thought he glimpsed the figure of a child with bare feet hugging the keel, playing.
~~Dream Cruise.
♥ Then two years ago, while driving the firm's van to Tokyo, he became stuck in heavy traffic. He was overcome by the claustrophobia of being surrounded on all sides by trucks. In that instant he realized that he really didn't belong on land after all. He belonged at sea with its unimpeded vistas. To describe how the sun set at sea, Kazuo would often form a circle with his arms, although such a gesture could never truly capture the actual grandeur of a sunset at sea. Whenever, stuck on congested traffic, he happened to recall a seascape, the beauty of the scene felt all the more poignant. How deep was the calm silence at sea compared to the deafening din of traffic! Thus awakened to the lure of the sea as if for the first time, Kazuo resolved that it was time to set out on a third voyage, and promptly contacted the company to this end.
♥ Nothing could be as appalling as seeing your family, your dearest loved ones, drown in the sea before your very eyes and finding yourself unable to lift a single finger to save them. If that weren't bad enough, the sensation of having pushed them over yourself lingers in your hands. Why, why? I cannot understand. It's the last dream anyone would want to have! Maybe the dream was born of fear. The terror of losing loved ones becomes so obsessive that you come to glimpse the worst possible scenario. Let that stand as the interpretation. Enough! I'd rather not think about it again...
It was clear to Kazuo what the writer was saying. A discussion of the previous night's dreams revealed that every member of the family had had the exact same dream the night before. Each had pushed the others into the sea with their own hands.
♥ Yoko made another strange remark today. She has a habit of doing this and it's beginning to annoy me. She seems convinced that she has some strange powers. Such nonsense must be the fad at school. She was probably scaring her classmates with that kind of talk at the school outing before summer vacation. The scene isn't all that difficult to imagine. I know Yoko shared a room with three others. When it got dark, the silly girl must have told them, "There's someone else in this room." Hinting that there was a fifth "presence" managed to scare the others. And so now she's trying the same trick on us. It's the kind of thing she would do.
♥ Two things bothered Kazuo now that he'd read the log. The first was that the entire family of four had apparently had the same dream at the same time. The second was that the presence of someone other than the family members had been sensed by at least one passenger. Otherwise, the log spoke of nothing unusual. It seemed a faithful description of a smooth voyage.
♥ Could he have done it himself? It was a hazy idea. Kazuo held out his palms and stared at them. He vaguely remembered seeing himself from afar untying the knot under some sort of compulsion. Another scene from the dream?
What he'd read in the log flashed into his mind.
...There's someone else on this boat.
♥ The walkie-talkie was useless. Undaunted, he kept shouting into the thing until his voice was hoarse. "Come in, please come in!"
Kazuo strained his ears. He thought he'd heard something, some faint noise coming from the remote depths of the walkie-talkie. An instant before the buzzing could form into words, Kazuo had instinctively thrown the walkie-talkie at the floor to smash it. It was too late, the buzzing had conveyed the words to his brain.
"Crush the life out of them."
♥ Like most seamen, Kazuo tended to be superstitious. Venturing out to sea, nature's untrammeled domain, you often encounter phenomena that are beyond the pale of human understanding. You stand a far greater chance of experiencing the paranormal at sea than on land.
♥ The shell's pattern looks like an eye. If you hold the bottle up and take a close look, it's really quite frightening, the way it seems to be staring back at you.
That's an EYE if ever I saw one. Normally the inside of a half-open shell is a lustrous pearly color. But this shell has a fleshy mound bulging out on each side. It's altogether different from the thin muscle that pulls the halves together; it looks like flesh, with scarlet capillaries on the surface. The lens and gelatinous cornea are a cloudy brown, with the overall shape of the eye slightly warped. They resemble the eyes of a rotting tuna and seem to exude malevolence. An uncanny gaze I must say. We really should get rid of the thing! Treasure or not, I can't stand it. Where could the silly girl have hidden it?...
♥ His perceptions became so clouded that he was no longer capable of understanding what exactly was happening. Countless people were conversing in his head at once. The incoherent din sounded like the roar that dominates the floor of the stock exchange Eventually the voices merged into one and prodded him from behind. Kazuo thrust his hands int the sea and scooped up seawater to bathe his aching temples. Leaning out over the side, he sunk his face into the seawater and peered down below. A dark, fathomless vortex was spiraling at the bottom of the nighttime sea. Gazing into it, Kazuo was nearly sucked in.
He never did notice. Kazuo never did find out where the daughter had hidden the small glass bottle. She'd tucked it away in a SUPPLY SACK. Tossed onto the lifeboat, it now sat snugly between the rubber bottom and the side tubing. In the silver sack, among packs of water and cans of food, the eye kept quiet.
~~Adrift.
♥ In those days, you didn't have to go far in this neighborhood before you caught sight of women trussed up in bondage fashion. They used to walk the streets outside in the garb they danced in. When they had to take the train, they draped a coat or cape over themselves to conceal their exposed flesh.
Women clad in what amounted to nothing more than underwear vanished with the bursting of Japan's "bubble economy." Just where did they all go? The whereabouts of at least one of these women is known. Her name is Noriko Kikuchi and she has drifted back to this neighborhood. Her frenetic dancing experience at Mephisto had taught her the joys of self-expression. She thus became an actress with a small theatrical troupe, and it was in such a guise that she retuned to the same building that once dominated the times.
♥ Kiyohara was constantly striking out in new and original directions. He believed that the scenario for a play should change according to the contours of a playhouse, and with it the performances. Any troupe's rendering was likely to become somewhat stereotypical after a dozen or so performances. What set performances by Kairin Maru apart was that the troupe managed to avoid this pitfall.
♥ As director, Kiyohara always sat among the audience, scrutinizing the stage from their perspective. He would mercilessly point out any mistakes he noted in the performance to cast members once the curtain came down. Accused cast members would have to rethink their roles and make proper adjustments by the next day. Thus, their theatrical production underwent a transformation even after opening night, right through to the final performance. A play honed to perfection over two months of rehearsal would often be turned upside down after the first performance. It was Kiyohara's practice to use feedback from the audience to refine the production.
♥ What Kamiya felt toward Kiyohara were the dual emotions of hatred and awe. Had he been able to dismiss Kiyohara's talent as a director, Kamiya would have left the troupe long ago. Kiyohara's overbearing and inhuman attitude was more than intolerable. Kamiya stayed with him because he possessed an almost tangible talent.
♥ With the finger of one hand still stuffed in the pipe, Kamiya started groping for the drainpipe with his other hand. The only way he could resolve the situation was to remove whatever was clogging the drainage. He pushed his finger into the pipe and extracted the dirt that was jammed inside. Long, bleached strands of hair came out on his finger. So the culprit was hair! Hair washed into the pipe had clogged it, and prevented the water from draining away. Kamiya vigorously shook his hand to get rid of the hairy debris on his finger. Yet no matter how hard he shook his hand, he could not dislodge the strands. They clung to his finger and felt strangely alive.
Unconcerned, he continued inserting his finger into the drainpipe and extracting the clogged hair. No matter how many times he repeated the procedure, the water trapped in the sink showed no signs of going down. He paused to rest his hand. As he did so, he happened to turn and look down at his feet. He almost jumped with surprise. Covering the entire area of the floor, the hair removed from the pipe undulated in the water like so much seaweed floating in the sea. There was so much hair in the water that he couldn't see the color of the floor beneath. What amazed him was not only the sheer volume of hair, but also the color. The tangled mass was an indescribable mixture of hues: black, white, brown, red, pink, all merging to form a faintly disgusting blend.
♥ In the mirror he saw the stall doors to five toilets. The doors of the two stalls to the left and the two to the right were open. Only the door of the stall in the middle was closed. The doors were designed to remain closed only when a stall was occupied.
...In other words.
Kamiya turned around and took a long hard look at the closed stall door. It seemed inconceivable that anyone could be in there.
All the lights were out when he'd reached this floor. The restroom had also been in complete darkness. Kamiya had had to turn on the lights.
..Every time he moved his feet, the hair that he'd pulled from the drainpipe got tangled on his heels. He hadn't realized until now that the water flooding the restroom floor was forming a current. The water began to flow towards the closed stall door and into the space beyond.
The noise of a toilet being flushed came from the stall. As if drawn to the sound, the water covering the floor rushed into the stall, gurgling under the locked door.
Kamiya steadied himself, his frame now rigid from head to toe. Whoever it was inside the stall had just finished. Kamiya heard the metallic sound of the door being unlatched, and it began to open. Through the crack, he saw something black squirm-not just one, but innumerable black forms, squirming.
♥ The action of the drama is played out on the third, fourth, and fifth floors of the building, with water flowing down from the upper floors to the lower, thereby providing a unifying vertical thread to the action.
..The disco known as Mephisto used to operate on three floors, each catering to clientele with different tastes. Each floor had its own turnstile for customers to grain admission through. Kiyohara has followed this system, staging different plays on each of the three floors-the third, fourth, and fifth. What serves to link each of these stages is the medium of water. Water will always fall downwards under the pull of gravity. Even in a concrete structure, water will find a way to leak down through the slightest crack. The effective use of water on its downward journey binds the three stages by a vertical link.
What makes Kiyohara the consummate businessman as well as showman is that he has priced the performance per floor. Those who watch the third-flood performance whet their appetites for the fourth-floor performance, which in turn spurs them to attend the fifth-floor performance. Thus, to grasp the significance of the man emerging from the flooded restroom, one must watch the play on the fifth floor. In this manner, members of the audience are enticed to visit the playhouse three nights in a row.
~~Watercolors.
♥ The epitome of caving lies not in exploring grottos that have already been discovered by others, but in being the first to set foot on the virgin rock of an undiscovered cavern. There can be no sweeter taste for a spelunker than such a moment. It is said that anyone who has savored it is destined to be forever addicted to caving.
♥ The cavern had opened up at the end of the narrow tunnel, and it was not until they stood that Sugiyama and Sakakibara became aware of its immense size. Upon realizing the vastness of the grotto, they were literally dumbfounded. While prepared to encounter a dead-end, they now found themselves in an enormous subterranean cavern that surpassed their wildest dreams. Limestone results from the sedimentation of the remains of sea creatures. Therefore, the area of land was at some time in the distant past located at the bottom of the sea. Thrust up from the sea, the earth had become land, later to be covered by woodlands. Water erosion had then formed this gigantic cavern of majestic proportions. Sugiyama stared at the ceiling in blank amazement, not so much at the size of the cavern as at the incredible length of time that it must have taken to form. After an enthralled silence lasting almost a minute, both of them started to speak at once.
"Fantastic!"
There was no other way to describe it.
♥ Putting his foot on a small ledge, Sugiyama assumed a rest position. He began to contemplate the nasty premonition he had just had. This was supposed to a virgin limestone grotto, one which no human had ever set foot in until now. Yet an uninvited flash of intuition suggested to him that sometime in the distant past, someone had tried to access this shaft just as he was attempting to now. It was an impression that must have formed unconsciously from having glimpsed some evidence of a prior presence.
♥ Sugiyama made his way up until he could feel Sakakibara's feet on his head. He flashed his light up through the gap between Sakakibara's waist and the wall of the shaft. To his amazement, the space above the mouth of the shaft was no longer open; it was blocked by the boulder.
He was stupefied. He felt the blood drain from his head. As he braved the dizziness, he regretted that they hadn't properly secured the boulder. With every rockslide, the boulder had tilted under its own weight to fall back to its original position, encountering and crushing Sakakibara's head in the process. It was too cruel a punishment to be meted out to someone for simply having deserted his post. Yet Sugiyama could not suppress his desire to curse Sakakibara for his stupidity.
♥ It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that the chances of rescue from outside were extremely low. The only alternative was for him to find a way out.
Sugiyama could sit and wait for a rescue team or think of some way of getting out by himself. In other words, he had but one real option. Yet any attempt to escape required so much courage it defied the imagination, and this reality was gradually dawning on Sugiyama. He would need courage, and no ordinary courage at that.
♥ There was still so much he wanted to do in life. There were all those adventures that he and his son Takehiko had in store, when his song grew a little older. There was so much he wanted to teach the boy. Sugiyama hoped to instill in him the lessons of life born of his own experiences, so the boy could take advantage of the knowledge and lead a more fulfilling life, supplement the knowledge with his own, and pass it on to the next generation. This, for Sugiyama, was the real meaning of human life. Neither could he help worrying about his wife and the child she was expecting. Yet he would have to try to keep his mind free from such concerns for now. There was no end to the unfinished business that crowded his mind, the insurance settlement, the mortgage, who would take care of his elderly parents, and so on. Still, he wanted to convey his will to his son.
♥ Even after the team had removed the boulder, Sakakibara's decomposing body had remained dangling there. As the team turned their flashlights on Sakakibara's corpse, they had been aghast to see the calcified back of his crushed skull cleaving as one to the limestone.
♥ Even when we know there is no way out, we sometimes have to press ahead in search of one, no matter how dim the prospects.
~~Forest under the Sea.
♥ Kayo believed that if you stood on the tip of Cape Kannon and prayed to the rising sun, all your wishes came true.
~~from the Epilogue.